Tuesday, 30 May 2017

1) That despite always
going on about it, people don't care very much about inequality, it is other
things (poverty, perceived unfairness, perceived injustice) that they care
about, but they confuse those concerns with concerns about inequality.

2) That politicians and
social commentators who continually bang on about our society being the most
unequal ever have got it backwards - we have never been more equal than we are
today.

3) That their motives for
these misunderstandings, distortions and fallacious arguments ought to be
scrutinised more rigorously because it paints them in a bad light, and causes their
integrity to be questioned.

That Blog post was
principally a commentary about UK
inequality. I'm sorry to say that when global inequality is measured, the
distortions get even worse (which is to the huge discredit of places like Oxfam,
who although they do an awful lot of good, tend to promote a deliberately false
and misleading narrative). They will promote headlines along the lines of the
top 1% owning about the same as the bottom 50% of the world’s population put
together, which as they well know completely ignores consumption parities,
counts those with negative net wealth as having zero, includes pensioners who live comfortably off but whose capital
income is relatively small, and overlooks students with future earning potential. In fact, using Oxfam's metric, a group photo containing students who had just graduated from Oxford or Edinburgh or Yale would be a photo containing some of the poorest people in the world, which is absurd.

As I reminded readers in this
Blog post, people's wealth accumulation happens over decades in ways that
static data analyses just don't capture. You'd like to think there'll come a
point when someone at Oxfam will sit up and suddenly think to themselves that
it is preposterous to record people about to graduate from Oxford,
Cambridge,
Edinburgh or Yale as being among the poorest in the world.

I've made these points
before, of course - but what I really want - what I'm desperate for, is for
someone from the left to tell me what is going on with this misleading data. Is
it a marketing campaign designed to paint a picture that will help achieve the
aims of the charity or political party, or is it that the people who compile
these statistics genuinely do not know how much they veer from the true
picture? I am genuinely interested.

On top of that, let me
articulate something that I believe most people see as being totally obvious
when they are told, but before which almost no one manages to notice. Those
people that get rich can only do so by making others better off, both in
providing consumers with things they value more than the money, and by
providing prospective employees with jobs they value more than not working. And
the higher up the rich scale you look - digital tech entrepreneurs, authors,
musicians, film stars - the more widespread value they provide (Google,
Facebook, Amazon, popular books, great albums, enjoyable movies, etc) - in both
goods and services that bring about mass value, and in the jobs they provide.
As we learn in this IEA article:

"Over 60 per cent of Kenyans use mobile phones to
make payments. Mobiles are used by farmers to compare and check prices so that
they are not exploited by local monopolies. Globalisation in general and mobile
phone technology in particular are major contributors to the huge growth in
incomes in poor countries in recent years. "

The people who have made
Google, Amazon, Facebook and best-selling books, films and music ubiquitous are
not wealthy at the expense of others, quite the opposite - they are wealthy
because they have made tens of millions of their fellow human beings better
off.

There is a crisis that
tears right through the inner organs of left wing social commentary. One would
like to believe that their intentions are good, that they do have the poorest
people's best interests at heart, and that they are really the champions of the
underdog. But what casts such huge aspersions over this is the fact that so
much of their narrative consists of deliberately misleading counterfactuals,
bogus statistics, calculated attempts to overlook or ignore much of the whole
picture and basic errors of reasoning.

As I always like to remind
people, actions speak louder than words, and the left do not behave as though
they have integrity and are on the side of the underdog, even if they state
that they are. If truth and facts were at the heart of their narrative, and
they wanted to make the world a better place in conformity with the facts, you
would hear them say things like:

"Yes, the world is hugely unequal in terms of
disposable income, but it is greatly narrowed by taxes, benefits and the closing
of the gulf in terms of consumption; Society is less unequal than ever before,
but we still want to do all we can to help the poorest in the world".

"Yes, increases in tax for the rich will have a detrimental
effect on our economy in terms of reducing productivity, stifling innovation
and deterring outside investors, but in spite of this, let me give you a list
of reasons why I'm willing to take a gamble on it for reasons I believe are
principled".

"Yes, the minimum wage does untold damage to the
economy, as well as pricing low-skilled people out of the labour market. And
I'm even aware that on top of that the minimum of wage is really a transfer of wealth
that has a cancelling effect because what extras these workers gain in one hand
they lose in the other through higher consumer prices".

"Yes, carbon taxes and green regulations achieve
one of our aims in costing in some of the price of people's negative
externalities, but we also acknowledge that they disproportionately hurt small businesses,
and may well turn out to have been a huge unnecessary cost as market
progression naturally takes care of supply and demand problems".

"Yes, rents and house prices are so high that
they are unaffordable for many. A lot of this is because we've so heavily
restricted the amount of land that can be built on, and heavily regulated the
building industry. We appreciate the negative impacts this has, but we
understand the trade off, and believe that preserving green land and
restricting the building industry has benefits that outweigh the costs".

"Yes, we understand that tariffs have numerous spillover
costs, we even understand that they make the nation as a whole worse off
because while they protect some domestic industries they hurt others, and make
our own citizens pay more for their goods. But nevertheless, we have weighed
this up and believe that as the costs are spread thinly throughout the country,
and that there are tangible groups of people that can be clearly seen to
benefit, it is a trade off we are willing to take".

"Yes, knife crime has risen under the government,
immigration hasn't fallen as much as we hoped, nor have NHS waiting times - but
we understand that these factors are hugely complex, and these things might
have occurred independently of MPs in Westminster. Therefore there is every
chance that things wouldn't have been any better if our party were in
government, as not everything that happens in complex societies is the fault of
or the cause of governments".

I could carry on with many
more examples, but you get the point, I'm sure. It would be so tremendously
unusual if you ever heard a politician speak like that - so unusual that you wouldn't be
able to help but think that he or she had had a bang on the head akin to Basil
Fawlty's in the episode with the Germans. It's such a shame people cannot hear things as they really are more readily, rather than having a society where politicians habitually mislead and distort because the public insists on nothing more.

Monday, 29 May 2017

I was just editing one of my books, and stumbled upon some old scraps I'd written years ago - one of which was this little passage about mental pursuit, which I quite liked and thought could bear repeating here:

It seems to me that the
pursuit of mental excellence can be thought of as being a bit like getting a
plane off the ground and into flight, because consistently solid and
comprehensive thinking comes with many components necessary for the task. A
pilot has to get all his (or her) dials and instruments in order before he can
take off, and keep a check on all the elements associated with aircraft's
altitude, air speed, air pressure and rates of ascent and descent.

For a pilot before take
off, some of the dials and instruments may be well attuned for flight, but
others may not be, thus affecting his ability to fly. Similarly, the human mind
may have some of the dials and instruments in the right place but have others
set wrongly. Perhaps a person is very logical and rational but is lacking in elements
like emotional intelligence, empathy and kindness, so is impulsive and never
sees the full picture properly. Or perhaps the person is excellent when it
comes to emotional intelligence, empathy and kindness, but has inadequate
knowledge or poor reasoning skills. The latter people may well often make
arguments based on moral persuasion, sounding caring, but will, in fact, lack
the concomitant rationality and proper assessment of the facts.

The human mind can be thought of as something similar to the dials and instruments in the cockpit: to attain mental excellence the mind needs to try to master all sorts of qualities, like logic, analytical intelligence, emotional intelligence, empathy, reason, rationality, lateral thinking, argumentation, assessment of data, wisdom and sound philosophical enquiry - as well as gathering stores of knowledge and understanding, which constitute the oil that lubricates all those proprietary parts. In addition, being truly mentally excellent requires, I believe, qualities like love, kindness, generosity and solicitude too.

Saturday, 27 May 2017

Ok, yes, that was a
deliberately provocative title to grab your attention - but bear with me. Some
of you may remember a film called Ransom, released in 1996, and starring Mel
Gibson as a father of a kidnapped son, who after a first failed attempt to pay the
kidnappers the $2,000,000 ransom money they demanded, gets a sense that they have
no intention of retuning his son alive.

As a response he decides
to appear on television to offer the ransom as a bounty on the kidnappers'
heads, with the bounty being withdrawn if the kidnappers return his son alive. The
kidnappers' inner circle is now far less stable as each gang member is now
unsure whether they can fully trust the other members not to betray them and
pick up the bounty. Later on the bounty goes up $4,000,000, and things get even
more tense within the gang's inner circle until (spoiler alert!!) the gang
implodes and their plan is thwarted.

This kind of observation
is nothing new. Plato talked about similar dictatorship insecurities in his Republic,
and everyone knows that when a group becomes less tight, be it a criminal gang,
a political group or whatever, the most prominent members with the most to lose
become the most vulnerable.

Now when I suggested
paying young Muslims to help stop terrorism, what I mean is this. Suppose the
authorities offered to pay would-be radicals, say, £2000 if they shop someone
they know to be planning a terrorist attack. Maybe pay them more, I don't know
what the market value would be to grass up a fellow Muslim in your
neighbourhood who is playing around with explosives and detonators, but sums of
money like this would be chicken feed compared with the overall counter
terrorism budget (the UK government currently spends over £15 billion a year on
counter terrorism).

Perhaps it would only
yield one or two positive outcomes, but even that is better than nothing if it
leads to the arrest and conviction of prospective attackers. Let's face it,
this kind of set-up already goes on with police informants in areas like drugs
and gun crime, and we see every day how market incentives regulate all kinds of
human behaviour, so why can't it work in exposing terrorism?

Not only would offering
financial incentives help police catch would-be terrorists and other dangerous
extremists before they went on to commit an atrocity, it would also create
instability among gang networks. If a prospective Islamist is planning a bomb attack in London
and the people in his inner circle, or even people outside it, know they can receive
a few thousand pounds if they shop him in to the police, the would-be terrorist
has got to watch who he trusts very closely, which is bound to make his inner
circle far less tight.

You may object that the
kind of radical suicide bombers that want to blow up infidels in order to ride
up to heaven on a winged horse where they'll be met by 72 virgins might not be the
sort of people who are very likely to be motivated by money, and you are probably
right. But equally the kind of person who is likely to inform on a dangerous
radical for a few thousand pounds is very unlikely to be the sort of Muslim who
is on the verge of being a suicide bomber. It cuts both ways.

Once you add up the £15
billion a year spent by the authorities, and all the costs that occur when we
do have a terrorist incident, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to offer
generous financial rewards to anyone who can help thwart an attack and send a
group of radical Islamists to jail to keep our streets safer.

Providing market invectives
to shop would-be terrorists means it would increase the cost of being a
would-be terrorist, which not only makes someone a potentially less effective terrorist,
it increases their risk factors too, and makes Islamist coteries less tight and
more unstable, increasing their chances of imploding, and at the same time making it easier for the police to infiltrate their organisations.

Wednesday, 24 May 2017

Politicians are often
playing political football with the matter of university tuition fees and
whether they should be 'free' or not.
I italicised the word free because,
as any thinking person ought to understand, free university education is not
free at all - it simply means that the cost of obtaining a degree is
transferred from the beneficiary of the degree to the taxpayers. It also means
forgetting about all the spillover costs of scrapping tuition fees - and here
is not the sort of place where I am going to let you get away with that.

It's actually unbelievable
to me that people can argue for 'free' tuition' fees, and not be embarrassed by how careless they've been in ignoring who picks up the cost, the nature of
supply and demand, and the numerous unseen costs attached to this policy.

The supply and demand
problem of further education began to get worse with the Blair government - his
party wanted more people to go to university, and they wanted tuition fees
lowered so that it encouraged more people to sign up to higher education. Alas,
Blair never bothered to consider whether too many people might go to university
at a reduced rate, and that the lower fees might increase demand to an
unhealthy or unmanageable level. As for the fact that however much you increase
demand you will not increase the universities' capacity for more students than
they can take....nope, there wasn't even a mention of that.

At their most expensive,
tuition fees are currently at the top level of £9250 - which basically amounts
to a loan from the government which is paid back when the graduate earns more
than £21,000 per year. The current tuition fees system is pretty much the
fairest system imaginable: the government loans to those who need the money to
obtain a degree, and it only asks for payment when the post-graduate can afford
to repay with a small proportion of their earnings. Anyone who thinks that that
is unfair has a pretty peculiar idea of unfairness.

What you have to realise
is that nothing comes for free in education. If tuition fees are scrapped, then
the cost of obtaining a degree is picked up by the taxpayers. Tax that goes on
to subsidise higher education amounts to lots of tax paid by low earners to
subsidise people better off than themselves. We know this because we know that
two thirds of working people do not have a university degree, and we know that
on average obtaining a degree boosts one's life earnings by 60% (at least, that
was true last time I checked - but that percentage is going to decline if the
market is oversaturated with post graduates).

The only way to think
correctly on this matter is to try to ascertain the value of higher education
in terms of prices. The value of higher education is this. University fees
should amount to exactly what it costs to obtain a degree, and fees (prices)
should match demand, whereby the right number of people are getting degrees,
and degrees are priced at their true value - a value that measures costs
associated with supply and demand. As I said the other day to a proponent of
scrapping fees, you cannot even begin to argue for 'free' university education
until you have tackled the four most pertinent issues:

1) How would you square
the demand-side problem of your policy, given that prices (to the students)
will be misaligned with limited supply?

2) How would you square
the supply-side problem of your policy, given that even with highly increased
demand, 'free' tuition won't magically make all those extra university places
available?

3) How would you ensure
the equitable allocation of resources (degree courses) in a system where demand
heavily outweighs supply, and in a situation where you no longer have price
signals to ensure the supply and demand curves intersect?

4) How would you respond
to the fact that the UK will suffer a degree inflation due to a surplus of
post-graduates?

As expected, she made no
attempt to answer any of those questions - she barely even acknowledged that
they needed answering. But this was no surprise, because the reality is,
answering the questions properly will not lead you to conclude that scrapping
tuition fees is a good idea - it will scream the opposite. Scrapping tuition
fees would distort the market signals regarding supply of degrees and demand
for university places, as it would artificially ramp up demand for places, and
bring deadweight losses regarding how people value university education.

You're not even getting
off the ground if you're not getting this most basic of points. When fees are
too low, people will study even though the cost of going to university is
greater than the benefits of a university education. When fees are too high,
people will be put off studying, which means there'll be too few university
graduates. A few of the low-fee protagonists have argued that a decline in
applicants would be evidence that the fees are too high. It would not be, as
I'll explain in a moment; it would be evidence of less educational waste, with those
no longer doing degrees being the people for whom the cost of going to
university is greater than the benefits of a university education.

Of course, the standard
argument in favour of subsidised higher education is that higher education
confers benefits on others as well as on the main beneficiary, so it must be
good for society if it is subsidised. It's a nice idea, but like many nice
ideas, the logic is faulty. Deodorant, mouthwash, shampoo and washed clothes
each confers benefits on others as well as on the main beneficiary, but no one
is arguing for deodorant, mouthwash, shampoo and washing powder to be
subsidised.

Here's the key reason why
- to take washed clothes as one example - when you wash your clothes you enjoy
the benefits of clean and fresh clothes, but so do others too - your not
smelling, your looking smarter, and your being a generally more pleasant person
to be around are benefits that do not need subsidising, because you'd willingly
buy washing powder yourself to ensure such things happen. The same is true of
avoiding bad breath and greasy hair - the government doesn't need to subsidise
mouthwash and shampoo because it knows you'll willingly pay for them yourself
in order to feel fresh and at the same time be socially agreeable.

This is what higher
education is like - the benefits and rewards that are obtained (increased
employment opportunities, higher earnings, being more highly educated, higher
social status, academic prestige, greater knowledge, better conversations, and
greater opportunities) certainly extend beyond the person doing the degree, but
they are benefits and rewards that people feel are worth having without the
need for a subsidy. That's why a heavy education subsidy only encourages
inefficient numbers of students, and why a system that charges people the cost
of their degree won't discourage people with real promise and potential from
entering higher education.

For those reasons -
unusual as it is - the government has its policy just about spot on with
tuition fees. It loans to those who need it, and it only asks for payment when
the post-graduate can afford to repay with a small proportion of their
earnings, which means smart people from poorer backgrounds need not be put off
from further education. To have no tuition fees would be to spread the cost of
people's higher education amongst the rest of the taxpayers - and quite why
anyone thinks they should foot the bill is beyond me.

Another good thing about
the government's policy is that it also avoids too much of a market mechanism
in higher education, which, if too money-centred can be a bad thing. Consider
why. Suppose Oxford and Cambridge had hiked up admission fees to attract the
elite. Such a policy goes against the thing they should value most - academic
credentials. If you are an employer looking to employ an Oxford graduate, who
would you prefer; one who got in on scholastic merit, or one who got in because
of a privileged financial background? The value of attending Oxford depends
largely on the university's reputation, which is built primarily on prior
academic excellence of former students. By having applicant quality as the
measure of admission, the average student quality can be increased, which then
further increases the prestige, which then increases the allure for
high-quality future applicants.

A system that neatly
balances the admission quantity between talented young people that can pay (and
do), and talented people that can't pay and are helped along the way, is a
system that is just about right. It is inevitably true that being from a
privileged high-achieving background does confer advantages on young people
that young people from working class backgrounds do not enjoy. This upsets lots
of people - but it should not. Privilege mostly comes (either directly or
indirectly) from high achievement. Therefore if you want to argue that that is
a bad thing, you are arguing that a world in which achievement engenders
advantage is a bad thing, which amounts to devaluing merit-based advantages -
and to do that is to make a mockery of applying skills and working hard in
general.

Are fees actually too low, not too high?

Instead of worrying too
much about rising tuition fees, what should be considered is that putting up
tuition fees might actually be a good thing for the country overall. There's no
doubt that higher education brings about huge financial benefits to the
county*, but there's also no doubt that having too many graduates devalues
graduation in the labour market, and that in a state of diminishing returns the
financial benefits would no longer bring about such efficiency.

The irony is, instead of
worrying too much about rising tuition fees, what should be considered is that
putting up tuition fees, or demoting some degrees to college level
qualifications, might actually be a good thing for the country overall. We know
that currently around 20% of post-graduates are doing a job that doesn't
require a degree (this figure might actually be higher) - which is indication
itself that there is a surfeit of degrees in a labour market with too few
degree-level jobs.

There is another very good
reason why value is so important - if degrees are valued commensurate with the
landscape of both supply and demand, and of the labour market, there is a
better chance of the number of graduate-level jobs matching the number of
graduates. For example, the future job market is going to see many current
graduate-level jobs replaced by computer technology, but it will also see an
increase in other graduate-level jobs that look likely to grow in number. Only
a proper market-based further education system can be optimally responsive to a
rapidly changing labour market environment, particularly with the proliferation
of service-industry jobs.

Prices are the market's
method of signalling how much of a good is available against the level of
demand for that good. An expensive good (like a degree) costs resources (time
and money) but those costs signal that those who value degrees most will get
them. The abolition of tuition fees would mean that universities have no way of
signalling the true scarcity and value of university places to prospective
students, particularly as through a taxpayer-funded system high and low demand
opportunities are going to be similar if not equal in price. Students, like
people in general, make much more informed decisions in life when signals
accurately match supply and demand.

The supply-side problem of
inflated degrees causes another issue too. According to Merryn Somerset Webb at
MoneyWeek - one of the go to places for statistical updates - currently around
45% of student loans end up being written off, where the tipping point at which
the whole thing starts costing rather than saving money is 48%. This problem is
in part due to graduates earning less than expected, or sometimes nothing at
all, but also due to the tax avoidance incentives woven into the system, such
as salary sacrifice.

“With clever planning, an employee can use salary
sacrifice to reduce their income below certain thresholds and therefore make
further savings. Take student loans, for example; many students leave
university with high hopes of landing a top job but can find themselves undone,
with low pay and laden with debt. Repayment of student loans is 9% of income
earned above £17,335 for those taking out student loans before September 2012,
and £21,000 for those taking a loan out after 1 September 2012. This can often
leave many university leavers with a lot less take-home pay than they need.
Taking into account Income Tax and National Insurance, a graduate will take
home just 59p in the £1 for part of their income earned above the repayment
thresholds. This would further reduce to 49p in the £1 for income earned above
the basic rate tax threshold and a quite frightening 32p in the £1 for each
pound of income earned between £50,000 and £60,000 if the graduate has two
children and is in receipt of Child Benefit payments.”

It's not exactly rocket
science, is it? Suppose our graduate earns £30,000, and has a choice of putting
money into her pension either via salary sacrifice or out of her net salary
(whereby the tax is claimed back). If she does it using salary sacrifice, her
official gross salary is not £30,000, it is £27,000. That cuts her National
Insurance bill and her income tax bill – but most essentially, it also cuts her
loan repayments from £810 to £540, where the resultant outcome is a take home
pay of £20,907 instead of £20,277. That's all very nice for our graduate, but
it's not such good news for taxpayers as a whole. It might well be time to
ditch the salary sacrifice scheme.

The thing is, if the
university supply and demand curves intersect - that is, if the demand for
degrees and the supply of degrees are in market equilibrium, then you can be
confident that the price at which this happening is an accurate one. However,
once the system becomes skewed whereby a loan is involved yet nearly half the
graduates never pay back even a penny of that loan, the alarm bells ought to
start ringing, because it's obvious that this is down to there not being enough
post-grads doing degree-level jobs. This is the market’s way of trying to tell
us that there are currently too many people doing degrees.

Because the taxpayer picks
up the cost of unpaid student loans, it means the surfeit of university degrees
in this country end up being subsidised by the general public - many of which
are low earners. Consequently, this means a great many of them are subsidising
people that are doing degrees and never earning enough to pay them back, while
the rest of the post-grads, the people that do pay them back, are effectively
being taxed twice on the same degree. Only a very narrow thinker could believe
that this is a system that's working well.

I am fairly certain that
even Jorbyn Corbyn is not stupid enough to think that if tuition fees were
scrapped, there would magically be enough university capacity for everyone who
wanted to take him up on this offer of a taxpayer funded free lunch. The only
effective way to align number of degrees with demand for degrees is to allocate
them with an efficient price system, because there are not an unlimited number
of degrees nor are there a limited number of degree level jobs. Subsidising
further education can no more eliminate degree inflation than adding more
dollars to Zimbabwe’s hyperinflated economy can ease its monetary crisis.

Are universities bastions of unfair discrimination?

I remember when the then
Prime Minister David Cameron launched a scathing attack on the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge for failing to recruit more BME (black minority ethnic)
students, saying that racism in the UK’s leading institutions “should shame our
nation”.

He was right that it's a
shame that there are not more BME students in our leading universities, but he was
quite wrong to lay the blame at the door of Oxford and Cambridge universities.
The so-called fact of Oxford and Cambridge being under-represented by BME
students is not to do with institutional racism at our top universities, it is
to do with the fact that prospective BME candidates are far outnumbered by
white British candidates, which has a lot of complex causes - but none of them
are the fault of Oxford or Cambridge.

It is quite easy to be
outraged at statistics if you don't understand them, and clearly David Cameron
just didn't get that there are simply not enough BME people in the country to
fulfil his wish. A quick Google search reveals to me that if a top university
accepted students in a way that precisely represented the UK demographic, then
for every 100 people, there would be 87 whites, 7 Asians, 3 blacks and 3
others. Even on strict egalitarian grounds it is very difficult to justify a
selection policy that doesn't see BME people outnumbered by whites.

But, of course, that's
only part of the flaw in David Cameron's reasoning - the other thing wrong with
his misunderstanding of statistics is that Oxford and Cambridge are not looking
for a representation in terms of ethnicity or skin colour, they are looking for
representation in terms of academic ability. That is to say, Cambridge and Oxford
universities are the seat of academic excellence in the UK - and if the
statistics show that only a small proportion of BME people get into Oxford or
Cambridge, and a large majority of students are white, that does not show any
institutional unfairness on the part of Oxford or Cambridge. It merely shows
that if Oxford and Cambridge are trying to attract the most academically gifted
students in the country, and if by far the greatest proportion of the most
academically gifted students in the country are not in the BME demographic,
then Cambridge and Oxford's admission policy is completely fair.

There is certainly a
conversation to be had about all the ways that BME and under-privileged pupils
in schools are disadvantaged or coming up against barriers to fulfilling their
potential, but that's not an indictment against our two best universities - and
David Cameron should have known better - particularly as it's very likely the
case that this phony 'outrage' is really just an attempt to court popularity
amongst the BME demographic

More bad reasoning

Another piece of faulty
logic doing the rounds in recent years has been the issue of caps. There used
to be a cap to ensure universities had a limited number of students achieving
grades AAB or higher at A-level. When the cap was lifted a few years ago,
some higher education commentators were concerned that this would lead to the
creation of an elite English “Ivy League”, reflective of the American higher
education systems, and possibly even alienating students from poorer
backgrounds less likely to achieve high grades.

Their fears have come to
pass, as currently over half of students achieving AAB or better at A Level are
concentrated in just twelve universities (they are: Manchester, Durham, Oxford,
Cambridge, Nottingham, Leeds, Exeter, Bristol, Warwick, Birmingham, Sheffield
and Southampton.)

However, even though there
is a high concentration of high grade students attending just twelve
universities, there is absolutely no reason why this should be a problem - in
fact, it is quite the opposite: it is a blessing in disguise, because it gives
exhibition to the healthiness of competition and the value of incentivisation
to do well and go to the best universities.

By equal measure, a
competitive higher education market incentivises universities to pull out all
the stops to attract the brightest and best students and be as high up as
possible in the league table of results nationwide. In a marketplace with
healthy competition and demonstrable incentives to strive for high standards
you would expect to see cluster groups of high achievers, just as you see in
sport, in retail and in entertainment. But competition doesn't just make the
best better, it raises (or has the potential to raise) the standard of
everyone, because it should incentivise lower performers to up their game,
either by improving standards, by innovating to capture an unfilled niche, or
in some cases by trying something different altogether.

The other peculiar thing
many people tell us is that if a higher education marketplace is too openly
competitive it will work against people who are bright but from disadvantaged
backgrounds. This is an absurdly counterfactual objection to have, because it
will actually have the opposite effect. An education marketplace that is too
money-centred will be a bad thing because, in terms of performance and results,
selection against bright disadvantaged students will disadvantage the
university.

Consider why. Suppose
Oxford and Cambridge had hiked up admission fees to attract the elite. Such a
policy goes against the thing they should value most - academic credentials. If
you are an employer looking to employ an Oxford graduate, who would you prefer;
one who got in on scholastic merit, or one who got in because of a privileged
financial background? The value of attending Oxford depends largely on the
university's reputation, which is built primarily on prior academic excellence
of former students.

By having applicant
quality as the measure of admission, the average student quality can be increased,
which then further increases the prestige, which then increases the allure for
high-quality future applicants. A system that neatly balances the admission
quantity between talented young people that can pay (and do), and talented
people that can't pay and are helped along the way, is a system that is just
about right.

By capping or scrapping the
fees universities can charge, politicians are depriving these great institutions
of resources and stifling the competitive component out of the market, which is
ultimately worse for students, universities, prospective employers and the
everyday taxpayer. A reliable price system is the only way to show who benefits
most from obtaining degrees and who benefits most from providing them. I don't
think I could put it any more unambiguously and compellingly than that.

Sunday, 21 May 2017

Last I
heard in the Guardian, around 80% of Britons think there is a big problem with
inequality in the UK.
They are not alone. Barack Obama once stated that income inequality is the
"defining challenge of our times", while Pope Francis calls inequality
"the roots of social ills", and Harvard professor Ichiro Kawachi described
inequality as a "social pollutant".

From my experience,
inequality is one big non-problem - it is the issue that everyone thinks
everyone else has a problem with, but no one really does. It's perhaps rather
like the mythological claim that violence on television causes viewers to go
out and be violent. If you asked anybody off the street whether they think
television makes them more likely to be violent, they'd say no, but they could
imagine it might be true in the case of some people. Well it might be true of the odd
few, but I see no reason why it would be generally true, because there are lots of other qualities expressed
on television, like kindness, humility and generosity - why does no one argue
that television makes us kinder, humbler and more generous?

The main reason I think
very few people actually have a problem with inequality is that they do not
behave as if they do - they only say that inequality is a national problem,
they do not act as if it is. Instead almost every day they spend their money in
ways that make the country unequal, and they compete (for jobs, for status, for
a partner, etc) not with those who are financially out of their league, but
with those socio-economically closest to them.

People certainly do lament the amount of
poor people struggling to make ends meet, but that's nothing to do with
inequality at all. 200 years ago, all but about 1% of the population were mired
in poverty and struggling to feed their families, not because poverty is caused
by inequality, but because poverty has been the natural state of humans for most
of our 200,000 year history.

Some will make claims that
an unequal society causes more civil tension, unhappiness, obesity, drug use
and crime - but even if there is a good argument for a direct causal link (which
I severely doubt, and have not seen), no one seriously thinks that anyone who
does these things would ascribe it to having damaging feelings about
inequality. Actions speak louder than
words. And from what I've seen, I'm going to say that the claim that
"around 80% of Britons think there is a big problem with inequality in the
UK"
is simply not true.

I suppose one of the main
reasons they frame it in terms of 'inequality' as opposed to plain 'poverty'
talk is because 'inequality' terminology helps give them a platform to peddle
the narrative of grabbing more and more wealth from the rich, as though it's
the rich's fault that people are poor. If people are brainwashed to believe
that wealth is a fixed pie, that it's zero sum, and that the rich are making
fortunes at the expense of the poor, it is easier to convince them that the
politics of envy can be made palatable in the form of redistribution
initiatives.

We know that humans have deep-seated
psychological reactions to matters of social hierarchy, feeling they need to
ensure the underdog is represented. This would be noble except for one key thing -
if they really had these people's best interests at heart they would learn the
facts and get their reasoning right instead of propagating falsehoods. This is
the big contradiction that undermines the left - if they are so on the side of
the poor why do they do so much to falsify the truth, distort facts and support
ideas that will achieve the opposite of what they claim to want?

Perhaps being human it is
easy to not learn the facts and run along with lazy assumptions, but it's no
small irony that the ones most often accused of being elitist, greedy and
uncooperative are the ones doing the most for the underdog and for human
progression; and the ones most loudly proclaiming themselves as justice-seeking champions of
the poor are the ones doing the most to hinder the
underdog and protract human progression.

Part of the misleading
distortions are centred around how people do their measuring. Claims are made
about wealth disparity using only a narrow range of measuring criteria -
usually disposable income - when it's perfectly obvious (or should be!!) that
what defines a person's well-being is so much more than that.

What I really want to push
the left on is why they deliberately ignore methods of measurement that paint a
truer picture and intentionally cherry pick data to distort the true picture.
Because, to that end, once you factor in everything people have, inequality is
at the lowest it has ever been. Once you include the market value of all the
other things people have, from pensions, welfare benefits, food stamps,
vouchers, state-funded health, education, social services, access to the
Internet, social media, and countless other things I could mention, you'll find that apart from disposable
income and status goods the world is the least unequal it has ever been.

The left, I'm afraid to
say, are measuring well-being with a narrow definition of wealth that excludes
all the numerous societal progressions that close the gap between rich and
poor. That is to say, they are bemoaning inequality by selectively ignoring all
the things that reduce inequality. Because the most important measure of
equality is not disposable income, it is consumption.

And the moment you get
beyond the fact that Richie Rich has a few extra yachts and luxury cars that
most of us won't ever own, you'll find that in terms of the most basic
consumption needs, once you factor in central redistribution through the tax
and benefits system, increased technology for the man on the street, more
leisure time, and so forth, the gap between Poor Pete and Richie Rich has never been narrower.

And even if you only want
to measure disposable income, I read in Forbes that those in the top quintile earn
on average 12 times as much as those in the bottom quintile, but that the
multiple dropped to 4 times once tax and benefits were factored in. Considering
the skills and academic differential between the top and bottom quintiles, an
average differential of times 4 isn't very great at all. As always, far from
being a den of injustice, the system is heavily skewed against the rich to
favour the poor.

"Cash benefits have the biggest impact, with the
average household in the lowest-earning fifth receiving £7,612 per year across
pensions, tax credit, housing benefits and other means of support. Benefits in
kind such as healthcare are also significant, adding up to £7,586 per household
per year, but they are also received by richer households and so do less to cut
inequality on this measure. In the financial year ending 2016, the average
income of the richest fifth of households before taxes and benefits was £84,700
per year, 12 times greater than that of the poorest fifth (£7,200 per year). An
increase in the average income from employment for the poorest fifth of
households has reduced this ratio from 14 to 1 in the financial year ending
2015. The ratio between the average income of the top and bottom fifth of
households (£63,300 and £17,200 respectively) is reduced to less than 4 to 1
after accounting for benefits (both cash and in kind) and taxes (both direct
and indirect)."

There is no question that
we are the most equal society that has ever lived. Through tax and benefits the
state reduces a 12 to 1 income differential to a 4 to 1 consumption
differential. The jury is still out on whether the left do not actually understand this,
or whether they do but wilfully ignore it because it impugns the uprightness of their
agenda. Either way, these faults continue to cast aspersions over a group that
are always claiming, in public, to have more integrity than the distortions and
untruths they propagate.

* A few months ago I wrote a blog post exposing some of the ways that politicians and the media distort the truth using bogus statistics.

Wednesday, 17 May 2017

A couple of weeks ago I
created a poll asking if readers thought the nations of the UK would be better
off if the UK split up or remained together. As expected, an overwhelming
majority thought it would be better if the UK stayed together.

I'm not so sure - by which
I mean I'm pretty confident that there'd be more positives to a split than
negatives. If you went away and wrote a list of all the things you like about
the UK
and all the things you dislike, here's what I think you'd find. Just about
everything you like would still be equally liked and appreciated if England,
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland had been separate, independent countries
all along, whereas some of the things you dislike would have been rectified if
the four countries were not part of a United Kingdom.

Roll off some of the
things you like about the UK - the literature, the scenery, the tolerance, the
fish and chips, the lakes, the coastal attractions, the music, the films, the
comedy, the pasties and the history, and you'll probably find they are tied to
a concept of a United Kingdom far less than you think.

With Brexit and the very
real possibility that Scotland
could become independent in the near future, the splitting up of the UK is a distinct
possibility. I'm now going to explain why after the initial upheaval this would
be the best thing for the people of England,
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. To begin to see
why, have a look at this:

As you can see from the
image above, the United States, the world's largest economy, accounts for
approximately 25% of nominal world GDP, and the seven largest economies (if you
include the European Union economies as one) account for 75% of the total.

However, there is a difference
between GDP and GDP per capita. GDP is the total economic output of a country -
that is, the amount of money a country makes. GDP per capita, however, is the
total output of a country divided by the number of people in the population,
which measures the average amount of money each person makes.

The leading countries in GDP
per capita - countries like Qatar,
Luxembourg, Macau,
Liechtenstein, Singapore, Bermuda, Isle of
Man, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway
and Hong Kong - have two very interesting commonalities.
Number one, they are relatively small countries, and number two, they are all
by and large the highest scorers on the Human
Freedom Index. That is to say, once you have in place essential things like
a stable society with human rights, property rights and a proficient rule of
law, the two most important factors in having a high GDP per person is that the
country is small and that it has economic freedom to enable market forces to do
their work.

There is a very noticeable
pattern regarding these small countries that top the league for GDP per capita
- they each have a state that interferes minimally in their economies. Even
when the politicians exude bossiness and heavy cultural shepherding, they
usually interfere in the economic transactions of their citizens very lightly:
they don't have minimum wage laws, nor a big public sector, nor do they
interfere very much in the freedom of contract between buyers and sellers, and employers
and employees.

In the past few decades
the median (real) income of these small, laissez faire nations has gone up by
30, 40, sometimes even 50 percent - and conversely, the nations that have
adopted the opposite approach have continued to be many of the world's poorest
countries.

What does all that have to
do with the United Kingdom,
you may ask? Well firstly, the main benefits of a smaller nation are benefits
that would diminish a lot of the so-called societal problems that make up present
day Britain.
For example, the smaller the nation the smaller the state, and the more
accountable it is to the population it governs. There is more transparency and
more competition, the success of laws and regulations are easier to evaluate, and
the efficiency relative to neighbouring countries can be more easily observed.

Let us suppose that England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland
became completely independent nations with their own elected governments, their
own exclusive set of laws and regulations, and their own financial autonomy. A
few years down the line, England and Northern Ireland have pursued more liberal
economic policies, lower taxes, lighter regulations and more personal freedom,
whereas Scotland and Wales have tried to pursue their socialist agendas resulting
in failing economies and social unease.

At election time, voters
will have a more transparent perspective of how different national preferences
yield different results, with the Scottish and Welsh governments being held
more accountable for their dismal performances, and the public being able to
look over the borders and assess which policies or freedoms are working for the
betterment of the English and Northern Irish citizens.

Because competition, remember, is the biggest driver of innovation and progress, and the most efficient expunger of waste and failure in the world. It works in the trading of goods and services, in ideas and innovations, in technological advancements, and it can work at the level of nation states and their comparable policies and systems of governance too.

Split the union, and as long as each nation has its own elected government, its own exclusive set of laws and regulations, and its own financial autonomy, you'll see competition doing its work, and eventually all four nations will rise in quality because of it.

Monday, 15 May 2017

We all know really why Jeremy Corbyn is a Brexiter in a Remainer's clothing - it's because he wants our nation to undergo a
prodigious re-nationalisation program, and he sees the Brussels Eurocrats as being
an impediment to this (one of the few good things about the EU is they prohibit
European nations from nationalising, subsidising and bailing out their own
interests, as it is, rightly, seen as being inimical to competition from
outside industries). Apparently some of Corbyn's nationalisation plans (like the nationalisation of the railways) are proving hugely popular. Now, while I've written before
about the imprudence of nationalised industry in the specific sense (see here
and here), and while I have numerous blogs on the benefits of the private sector over
the public sector (if you were ever inclined, all of them can be seen by
clicking on this Private
Sector vs. Public sector tab), I probably haven't written a blog post that
swiftly points out why generally speaking nationalised firms are worse for us
than non-nationalised ones.

A good place to start here
is to remind you of Milton Friedman's famous dictum regarding the four ways to spend
money:

“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You
can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really
watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then
you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday
present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the
present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s
money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure
going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on
somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not
concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s
government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.”

Now, given that
politicians have certain popularity-gathering incentives to spend taxpayers'
money well, you'd think they might have constant mindfulness of appearing to
the public to be prudent spenders. In a small sense this is true, yes - but
what you have to remember is that due to asymmetry of information, short
memories and copious amounts of spin, the relationship between a government's
achievements/mistakes and the public's perception of them is pretty opaque and
obfuscated - which is precisely what politicians and civil servants love.

If you’re spending someone
else's’ money on someone else, as the government does with its various
'investment' schemes (which are rarely investments actually, they mostly mean 'costs') then the motives
are likely to be less prudent than if you’re spending someone else's’ money on
yourself. But both pale in comparison to if you spend your own money on
yourself, which is what private businesses do, and because of which they have a
better nose for efficiency, targets and outcomes.

The private sector is
astronomically more competitive, because it has to forecast future demand and
attract funds competitively. That's why public sector projects are far more
notorious for cost overruns, being overstaffed, and for costly time delays.

That is why, apart from
government spending that helps the needy and most vulnerable in society, low
levels of state spending make society better off. Private investors are
generally more prudent because it is their own money at risk, whereas the
public sector corresponds to the fourth quarter of Friedman’s quadrant: they
spend other people’s money on others far more recklessly. And while we're at it, the national beef with
big business is a strange one too. Quite often goods and services are produced
more efficiently when they are produced large-scale. A firm might be able to
make 50,000 burger meals in less than twice the time it takes a smaller firm to
make 25,000. Trading small-scale often reduces the extent to which comparative
advantage takes effect. Bob's metal firm can spend 3 days making 10,000 hooks,
and Jim's carpentry firm can spend 3 days making 2,000 varnished boards,
whereas one firm making both may take 8 days to produce that quantity.

A firm is said to be a
more effective trader if it can produce a good or service at the same quality
but at a lower cost than its competitors. And the benefits to society occur
when as many firms as possible specialise in their field of comparative
advantage and use it to trade. Therefore, it's usually the case that the country's
biggest firms are the ones providing the most value for consumers, as well as
being the biggest job creators. To end, here's a thought experiment. Imagine if
you pulled 30 people off the street in a random fashion, took them to an
airfield, showed them all the parts of a Boeing 747 and asked them to work out
how to build the plane from scratch. These non-experts would be clueless
regarding how to assemble those proprietary parts - and the take home lesson
would be: don't leave big and important jobs in the hands of amateurs, which is
exactly how we should feel about our politicians and our economy.

Wednesday, 10 May 2017

Get ready to be frustrated more and more in the General Election build up - there will be many politicians that are going to try to appeal to us by promising to offer something 'fair'. Ninety nine times out of a hundred you are going to know that they are not even attempting to talk sensibly or coherently.If I stood in
the street asking random passers by what a banana is, they'd say something like
"It's a curved yellow edible fruit", and there would be no
disagreement about that description. On the other hand, if I stood in the
street asking random passers by what fairness is, they'd say something
"The quality of being fair", but there would be countless
disagreements about that description in terms of what fairness means in a given context.

Everyone knows
what the concept of fairness is, but everyone disagrees about which economic
situations are fair and unfair. Consequently, then, I'm fed up hearing
politicians saying they want a 'fairer' society, or a 'fair' welfare system or a 'fair' pension system
or a 'fair' tax system, because they never tell us what they mean by 'fair' -
they just use it wantonly because they know it's a word everyone likes, and everyone will hopefully think them caring and noble.

But what exactly
is fairness in these terms? Is something 'fair' if the process by which it
arrived is fair? Or is fairness an equitable distribution of something? If a
politician fails to explain what he means by 'fair' his statement is ambiguous
to the point of being facile. An inequitable distribution need not be unfair.
Take a factory as a good example: a floor worker, a supervisor, a manager and a
company director have an inequitable distribution of the business's money, but
that doesn't make their salary unfair. Equally, stealing from the business in
order to give everyone a fair slice of the pie would be an equitable
distribution, but the process by which it arrived is unfair.

Cunning politicians and how they try to dupe youThe ambiguity
around the word 'fairness' is only a microcosmic example of the wider problem
of the dividing glass between what politicians say and what those words
actually mean when heavily scrutinised. Politicians are quite used to this
sleight of hand rhetoric, because they are taught to speak as ambiguously as
possible whilst remaining in the sphere of perspicacity.

If they speak
with too much clarity then the electorate will be able to see that they are
against the proposal or that they have employed selective information. But if
they are too convoluted they will hold no appeal either. So the key to spin is to
speak in a way that will get as many of the electorate on their side. And the key
to doing this is in making statements that are hard to disagree with but that
remain so abstract they continue to be distinct from any coherent policy.

You see,
generally speaking the most illogical and fallacious and damaging ideas that
politicians come out with are not ideas that make them look immediately senseless
and outlandish. They are usually ideas that appear on the surface to be
somewhat plausible because they have just enough about them to seduce the
average person who is accustomed to only considering ideas in terms of their
tangible benefits. To put it another way, if the truth is north, and falsehood
is south, most of the dodgy policies that politicians try to run by us are
somewhere between north east and east - enough to steer voters off from the best
path but not quite enough to have the electorate feel they are going in the
opposite direction to what is best for their society.

For two
reasons, then, policy-making is likely to make the main parties become more homogenised over time.
In the first place because to speak in a way that will get as many of the
electorate on your side means choosing from a fairly narrow range of customary
voter-friendly phrases. And in the second place, most politicians if they
employ a basic standard of reasoning should arrive at more or less the same
conclusions about what is the right policy. That they do not - at least not
publicly - shows that emotional biases and spin-friendliness are impeding this.

A party really
has three groups that are the target of their spin, with one group standing out
a mile (this is an oversimplification but not in any way that affects the
integrity of the point). There are the two groups who are dyed in the wool
either for you or against you, and there are those in between, who make up a
variety of comparably amenable individuals. And as I explained in my blog post entitled One
Of The Big Ironies Of Blog Writing, there are some you'll never lose, some
you'll never win, and a whole assortment of people in between.

Alas, even if
we believe it's the inbetweeners that have the most serious decisions to make,
and the ones most genuinely open-minded enough to ponder them, I'm afraid the
options voters have in front of them is rather like Hobson's choice. Because in
asking us to choose between one party or another, we are not being asked to
choose between a rump steak and a fillet steak, it's more like being asked to
choose between a medium rump steak and a medium-rare rump steak, which is
unfortunate if you happen to prefer fillet.

Thursday, 4 May 2017

How familiar is this? A Guardian
columnist - in this case a woman called Van Badham - sees something she doesn't
like and proposes a ridiculously absurd solution to rectify it. On this
occasion, the beef is with multinational corporations basing their operations in
places where workers are paid a lot less than in countries like ours. The
solution, she suggests, is an international
minimum wage.

It's almost as though
these people live in a bubble that insulates them from any critical thought or
even the remotest understanding of consequences linked to actions. Yes, we all
dislike it when workers are maltreated, and we'd all join the Guardian in
speaking out against these abuses - but her article isn't a groan about that, it's a
groan about low wages in the developing world.

To see why an
international minimum wage isn't the answer, you have to first understand
something basic. The reason the wages of workers in places like Thailand, Bangladesh
and Cambodia are lower than
in places like the UK
is because their productivity is lower. Wages for textile workers in Japan used to be similar to wages in for textile
workers in Thailand, Bangladesh and Cambodia,
whereas now they are similar to wages in the UK. The thing that's changed in the
past few decades is that Japan
has become much more productive.

So while low wages in Thailand,
Bangladesh and Cambodia (low relative to UK wages, that is) tend to upset cosy
Westerners like Van Badham - what she is really upset about is that workers in
Thailand, Bangladesh and Cambodia are, for perfectly understandable reasons,
not as productive as UK workers.

Consequently, then, an
international minimum wage is not going to change this productivity
differential. It will, however, do lots of other damage, mostly to the poorest
people in the world trying to earn enough to survive.

To see this more clearly,
let me offer an analogy. Suppose the value of a manual worker around the globe
is comparable to cars. A UK manufacturer can be said to be like a £50,000
Porsche, a Spanish manufacturer can be said to be like £30,000 BMW; and a Thai
manufacturer can be said to be like a £7,000 Vauxhall Corsa.

Suppose an international
minimum car price were to be introduced. From now on, it is illegal to buy or
sell a car for less than £15,000. Who is made worse off? It's not the Porches
and the BMWs, it's the Vauxhall Corsas, the Peugeots and the Nissan Micras - in
other words, the less valuable cars in Thailand,
Bangladesh and Cambodia. What
ought to be obvious is that an international minimum car price law won't make
cars worth £7,000 any more valuable to buyers, but it will make them illegal to
sell at their value, because the law inflates their price by at least £8,000.

Once you bring the analogy
back to poorer people trying to earn a living, it should be obvious that as an
international minimum wage isn't going to increase the productivity of workers,
and therefore won't make them any more valuable to employers, it will make it
harder for them to hold down jobs and hinder the general growth of developing nations,
not to mention probably increase worker maltreatment in the shape of black
labour markets. Other beneficiaries of an international minimum wage law would be the higher skilled workers who don't lose their jobs through such a policy but can now command higher wages as a result of the international minimum wage starving the market of less-skilled competition. History provides us with a real life example of this when in 1930s America the wages of the textile workers were higher in the north than in the south, where the cost of living was lower. The introduction of the federal minimum wage made it much easier for the northern firms to compete, because the wage advantage the south had was cancelled out, which as expected brought about all kinds of difficulties for the southern textile industry.

After spending five minutes
perusing a few more of Van Badham's columns, you see the same error repeated in
every one of them; she concerns herself only with who gains from a policy
without the slightest attempt to enumerate the costs, never mind weighing up the
costs against the benefits and giving her readers a framework for assessing what
she thinks are net benefits. If she addressed this, she would be more likely to
see why an international minimum wage is a silly idea.

Not only is it a silly
idea for reasons already mentioned, it is also an unfair idea because it
essentially acts as a tax on hiring workers, taking from the people who buy the
goods and passing onto the people who make those goods. And if you're observant
you'll probably have noticed by now that the many of the people who buy goods from
relatively poor people are also relatively poor people. Even in the developed
world - next time you're in Burger King, have a look at the people serving, and
at the people waiting to be served - the latter do not, on average, appear to
any wealthier than the former.

An international minimum
wage would place an unfair burden on the employers who are already doing more
than anyone else to provide the jobs to help citizens in developing nations -
the employers of low-skilled workers with low productivity. An analogy: at
lunch times in school only 10% of the pupils clear away their plates and
cutlery afterwards. The headteacher decides there are too many plates and too
much cutlery left in the canteen after lunch, so she demands that the pupils
who already clear up after themselves should do more to help rather than the
pupils who do not. In real life the firms doing most to create jobs in the developed
world are like the 10% of the pupils that clear away their plates and cutlery
after lunch. It is insensible to demand that they are ones that should clear up some
more.

About Me

This is the Blog of James Knight - a keen philosophical commentator on many subjects.
My primary areas of interest are: philosophy, economics, politics, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, theology, psychology, history, the arts and social commentary.
I also contribute articles to the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economics Affairs.
Hope you enjoy this blog! Always happy to hear from old friends and new!
Email:j.knight423@btinternet.com